has a number on his cap;
he is catalogued somewhere, but not in the library. Thank heaven he is
no book, but just a good black human being. I rush up and shake hands
with him. He nearly falls into his cab with astonishment; but I must
get hold of life again, and he looks so real and removed from letters!

"Uncle!" I whisper, close in his ear, "have ye got it? Quick--

"'Cross me twice wid de raabbit foot--
Dar's steppin' at de doo'!
Cross me twice wid de raabbit foot--
Dar's creakin' on de floo'!'"

He makes the passes, and I turn down Boylston Street, a living thing
once more with face toward--the hills of Hingham.

It is five o'clock, and a winter evening, and all the street pours
forth to meet me--some of them coming with me bound for Hingham,
surely, as all of them are bound for a hill somewhere and a home.

I love the city at this winter hour. This home-hurrying crowd--its
excitement of escape! its eagerness and expectancy! its camaraderie!
The arc-lights overhead glow and splutter with the joy they see on the
faces beneath them.

It is nearly half-past five as I turn into Winter Street. Now the very
stores are closing. Work has ceased. Drays and automobiles are gone.
The two-wheeled fruit man is going from his stand at the Subway
entrance. The street is filled from wall to wall with men and women,
young women and young men, fresher, more eager, more excited, more
joyous even than the lesser crowd of shoppers down Boylston Street.
They don't notice me particularly. No one notices any one
particularly, for the lights overhead see us all, and we all understand
as we cross and dodge and lockstep and bump and jostle through this
deep narrow place of closing doors toward home. Then the last rush at
the station, that nightly baptism into human brotherhood as we plunge
into the crowd and are carried through the gates and into our
train--which is speeding far out through the dark before I begin to
come to myself--find myself leaving the others, separating,
individualizing, taking on definite shape and my own being. The train
is grinding in at my station, and I drop out along the track in the
dark alone.

I gather my bundles and hug them to me, feeling not the bread and
bananas, but only the sense of possession, as I step off down the
track. Here is my automobile. Two miles of back-country road lie
before me. I drive slowly, the stars overhead, but not far away, and
very close about me the